creepy hollow 05 - a faerie's revenge (17 page)

Nothing.

I tilt my head back and squeeze more tears from my eyes. “Gone,” I whisper.

Exhaustion adds itself to the weight I’m carrying. Where I couldn’t bear to keep still earlier, now even standing feels like too much of an effort. I move to the side of the porch and sit down, pulling my knees up to my chest and leaning against the railing.

Chase walks onto the porch and stares at the lake. “Those were guardians who were after you,” he says quietly. “What happened?”

I press my lips together as hot tears travel down my cheeks. “They know about my Griffin Ability,” I murmur. “They expelled me.”

I sense Chase turning to look at me, but I keep my eyes pointed at the floor in front of my feet. “Calla, I’m—”

“Don’t.” I don’t want to hear anyone say they’re sorry. It makes no difference. It doesn’t fix anything.

He walks to the other side of the porch and back. He rubs his neck. He looks at me again, but says nothing. I guess he can’t figure out what to say. I don’t ask him to leave. I don’t ask him to stay. I want both. Neither. I want him to fix this unfixable mess so I can go back to the life I’ve always wanted. The life I came so close to getting. No one can fix this, though. Not even him.

Finally Chase lowers himself to the floor. He leans back against the wall beside the front door. He stares at the lake, and I stare at the floor, and the only sound is the occasional whisper of leaves rustling against each other in the nearby trees. I run my tongue along the cut on the inside of my lip as silent tears continue to wet my cheeks. I feel brittle and alone, and all I want is someone’s arms around me, promising me that everything will be okay. But it seems I’ll never have anything I truly want.

More silence. More tears. The moon climbs a little higher.

“I really liked you,” I whisper after an indeterminate amount of time has passed. “Why did you have to turn out to be …
him
?”

He rubs a hand over his face and says, “I’m sorry. I wish every day that I wasn’t. I wish I could go back and choose a different path.”

I wipe my tears away and wrap my arms around my legs. Quietly I ask, “How can you live with what you’ve done?”

His jaw tenses. He takes a shuddering breath. “With great difficulty.” He presses his trembling lips together, and when he turns his head the other way, I wonder if it’s to hide tears. “There is blood on my hands that can never be washed off,” he says in a raspy voice. “I will spend the rest of my life trying to make up for what I’ve done, and it will never be enough.”

No
, I think to myself.
It won’t be.
How can one person ever make up for that much wrong?

Appearing to have his emotions under control, he looks back out at the lake again. There are so many things I want to ask him. So many things I want to understand. And talking about him is easier than talking about me. “You’re a halfling,” I say. “Why do you look like a faerie?”

He turns his gaze to me and says, “It’s simple. The pale color in my hair is a result of bleach. The pale color in my eyes is due to contact lenses. I could never find quite the right color to match my hair, but this seemed close enough.”

“Contact lenses? Those things humans put in their eyes to help them see better?”

“Yes. They aren’t only to correct vision. Some are colored. It’s a simple camouflage faeries wouldn’t expect.”

I watch him for a moment, then say, “I want to see your real eyes.”

Without a word, he stands and goes back into the house. He walks out a minute later and, instead of returning to his spot against the wall, he sits in front of me, close enough that I can properly see his face, but leaving a comfortable amount of space between us. He looks into my eyes, and I look into his. They’re a warm, rich brown. These are the eyes I saw behind the panther mask at the Liberation Ball. These are
his
eyes.

“No more deception,” he says.

I nod. “No more deception.” I hug my knees closer and say, “Tell me the truth. All of it.”

“All of it? We may be here for some time.”

I shrug and try to push my sadness aside. “It doesn’t matter. I have nowhere else to go.”

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

My name is Nathaniel Aaron Chase. I was born in the human realm twenty-eight years ago to a faerie mother and a human father. Her name was Angelica, and she disappeared not too long after I was born. After my dad recovered from his broken heart, he met and married the woman who became my real mother.

I lived a sheltered life. I had no siblings, and my parents provided me with pretty much anything I wanted. I wouldn’t say I turned out to be a spoiled brat, but I certainly knew nothing about suffering. I was innocent, naive, and I’d never had to make a difficult choice in my life. Then one night a faerie girl showed up in my bedroom, and everything changed.

I was totally unprepared for the world I discovered. This world of magic where almost anything I’d thought impossible suddenly became possible. I thought it was amazing at first, the forest and the colors and the creatures and the spells. And the faerie girl—Violet—was even more incredible. I fell for her quickly. I even thought I loved her.

But things went wrong almost immediately. There was a prince, an Unseelie prince, and he wanted things he shouldn’t want. He wanted his mother’s throne, he wanted an army of Gifted fae—along with the guardian whose special ability allowed her to find them—and he wanted the power that once belonged to the infamous halfling, Tharros Mizreth. This power was locked in a chest, and only Angelica knew where the chest was. She also knew how to unlock it.

So how did I end up entangled in this Unseelie prince’s plot? Well, I had a connection to Angelica
and
to the Guild. I could help Prince Zell get everything he wanted. And once it turned out that I had magic of my own—and not only magic, but a Griffin Ability too—Zell used that as his bargaining chip. I had no hope of controlling this power that had suddenly awoken within me, but Zell introduced me to someone who could help. A girl who called herself Scarlett. A girl who was half siren and had no problem using her enticing powers on me or anyone else. I learned to protect myself from her influence eventually, but back then, lost as I was in this new and dangerous world of magic, I found her powers hard to resist.

I wound up stuck in the middle then, with the girl I loved on one side and the guy who threatened my family and promised to teach me about my magic on the other. It was a dangerous game to play, trying to keep both sides happy. Zell watched my every move, so I couldn’t tell Violet about him. And I didn’t tell Zell that Violet was the guardian he was looking for. Instead I hoped to find my own way out of this mess before he could get his hands on her. But it wasn’t long, of course, before Zell found out that I’d been lying to him and that she was the one who could find people. After punishing me, he told me I had to deliver her to him. He threatened my parents so that I’d have no choice but to comply. But I loved Vi, and I didn’t want to simply hand her over.

I came up with a plan. It was stupid, barely a plan at all, but I thought it would be enough to keep everyone safe. In the end, it did, but Vi hated me after that. I knew she’d never trust me again. Zell refused to let me go—he wanted to use me for my power over the weather—and even if he had allowed me to leave, where would I have gone? He was right when he said I’d never belong in the human world again. Not with all that power waiting to erupt from me at any moment. There was no one in my old life who could possibly understand what I had been through and what I was still going through. I watched my parents from a distance, hurt and confused and heartbroken with no idea as to why their son had simply disappeared one day. But at least they were safe.

I was forced to watch Zell’s plan coming together. I was even forced to help bring in some of the Gifted people he was hunting down. Not you, though I remember seeing you there. I remember looking into that dungeon and hating it. Hating myself for being part of it and doing nothing to stop it. When I could take it no longer, I ran. I had no plan at all. I simply left. I cast some protective spells around my parents’ house, and then I fled into Creepy Hollow, looking for Vi. She was my last hope. I knew she hated me, but I had nowhere else to turn, and I hoped she would hear me out and somehow forgive me.

She didn’t. She told me she never wanted to see me again, and it hurt more than I expected. The decision I made then changed the course of history: I went back to Zell. I shouldn’t have. I should have gone off on my own. I probably could have made it work. I could have found some community of kind people willing to help out a halfling still learning about his terrifyingly destructive power over the weather.

Or perhaps not. I’ll never know.

I didn’t believe I could do it on my own. I thought Zell and Scarlett were the only ones left who could help me. So I returned to the Unseelie Court, hoping Zell hadn’t noticed my brief disappearance. He had, though. He dragged me off to the human realm, to my parents’ house, where he easily broke through the protection I’d put around them. Then he murdered my parents while I was forced to watch.

Something inside me broke that day. I had nothing left to fight for. On the one hand, I had my unbearable grief, and on the other, my boiling hatred for Zell—and for Violet, who could have prevented this by forgiving me and taking me back into her life. It seemed to me I had a choice: death or revenge. Unfortunately for the entire fae realm, I chose revenge. I kept my mouth shut and did everything Zell told me to. In order to gain his trust once more, I finally told him where Angelica was hiding, in the center of a labyrinth she’d built to keep the chest of power hidden. Then I helped Zell find the last griffin disc. To him, I seemed like a loyal servant.

But in the end, when we opened the chest, I killed him and took all of that power into myself. And the plan that I’d carefully and secretly been putting into place, the plan that only Angelica knew about, began to unfold. The Creepy Hollow Guild exploded because of a device Violet had unknowingly planted there for me. The Gifted army was now mine to control—with an enchanted mark I placed on everyone’s palm—and one of them started the enchanted fire. The powerful winds I set in motion helped to spread the fire quickly. We attacked the Unseelie Palace, the Seelie Palace, all the Guilds across the realm. By morning, our world had changed completely. Everyone knew of The Destruction and Lord Draven.

There was so much power contained within me. Everything was so easy. I could do
anything
. But there was something else that was different aside from the increase in power. I didn’t quite feel like the same person. As time passed, there seemed to be less of me and more of …
him
. Tharros. His ideals and his desires. In the beginning, my plan had been about destroying Zell’s world. Destroying Violet’s world. Pain and the desire for revenge had led me there. But once that ancient power was within me, influencing me, taking over, I wanted more. I wanted our entire realm to kneel at my feet. I wanted the
human
realm to kneel at my feet. And that didn’t come from me—it came from him.

Scarlett noticed the change first. Before I did, in fact. It worried her. After Zell killed my parents, we’d become friends of sorts. Well, I’m not sure ‘friend’ is the right word, but we looked out for each other. I admitted to her that I wasn’t as loyal to Zell as I let on, and she confessed that she’d made a mistake becoming involved with him and his horrible schemes. She confessed her guilt at helping Zell get hold of
me
. She didn’t quite appreciate the way I took Zell down, though. After The Destruction, she told me I was even worse than him. Angelica said I should have killed her for making a comment like that, but it was early on still; I hadn’t become quite that heartless yet. Scarlett left soon after that. I could have put more effort into tracking her down, but it didn’t seem worth it. I think a tiny part of me still cared enough to let her go.

And so my reign continued. Angelica stayed by my side through everything, as we rebuilt the Guilds and the Unseelie Palace for our purposes. As we hunted down unmarked fae and cast our brainwashing spells over them. As we threw the enemies we particularly wanted to punish into her labyrinth to be driven to insanity by the endless passages and the confusion spells. Amon was also there from the beginning, a trusted follower of mine since the moment I betrayed Zell. He did anything I asked. Looking back now, I don’t remember much of it. I think it got to the point where there was barely any of me left. There was only Tharros and his power and his desire to rule over every living thing.

My memories of the end are unclear as well. Violet confronted me, along with the weapon I’d read about. The only weapon that was supposed to be able to truly destroy me. Well, not me, but this being I’d slowly become after fusing my power with someone else’s. I’d read the prophecy. It said someone else was supposed to kill me, and I’d already marked that someone else, so I was convinced I was safe. Though I don’t remember much else, I remember that feeling. The certainty that I was invincible.